Presidential Address to the XV IASC Conference in Fujiyoshida, Japan by Leticia Merino.

1. Leticia Merino, Presidential Address to the XV IASC Conference in Fujiyoshida,
Japan.
The challenges of the IASC, the promises of the IASC?
“We need to be able to understand complexity and not treat it as a synonymous of
chaos”
Elinor Ostrom
“A democratic environment does not solve knowledge problems by itself, but creates
an environment where adaptive collective knowledge is possible”.
Fikret Berkes.
Welcome to the many of you who have traveled from far away to this mythical
land of Japan. We are together believing in the value of learning from each
other; searching opportunities to find common interests, experiences and
create joint initiatives. Welcome to the new comers to the IASC gatherings, to
many young faces and long time friends, members of the “IASC community”.
My own perspective, my work, my professional and friendship networks have
always enriched from each of our conferences: from Bloomington, to Zimbabwe
and Oaxaca; from Bali to Cheltenham and Hyderabad and now in XIV IASC
Conference, facing Mount Fuji.
Since the very beginning in the last 1980 the IASC -then IASCP- acknowledged
the value of diversity and cross fertilization among sectors, disciplines and
regions of the world. This is our great strength and richness, it is also a source
of many of our challenges. There are many barriers to be international,
interdisciplinary, multi-method while working about different types of
resources. It is not easy to be academic innovative and rigorous, but also
relevant for people working in the field. As academics we are not taught to
learn from and with practitioners and communities, to work with them as close
colleagues, not merely “case studies”.
In the name of the International Association for the Study of the Commons I
deeply thank Onshirin Regional Public Organization, the Research Institute for
Humanity and Nature and Dr. Margaret McKean for their generous reception, for
the many hours of work, travel and meetings they have invested in the XIV
IASC Global Conference. I deeply thank all our Japanese and international
fellows working on and in Japan for this unique opportunity to learn from this
unique country. : There is so much to be learnt from Japan´ s long history and
culture of the commons. Plenty of social creativity has been displayed in Japan
during centuries of use, governance, restoration, defense and creation of
commons. From the traditional “irai” that through ages sustained the
management and use of lands, forests and fisheries to contemporary

2. experiences that include local efforts and volunteer civil society associations
working on a wide variety of commons. Onshirin managing the Northern slope
of Kitafuji is an emblematic examples, but these cases include: collective
restoration of the native sotoyama forests, irrigation associations and fisher
cooperatives, watershed districts; local markets practicing fair trade, and the
powerful community responses to natural disasters as the Tohoku earthquake
and tsunami. Histories of struggles in defense of local commons are also
abundant in Japan, from the resistance of members of forested “irai” against
the appropriation of their commons by municipalities during the Meiji period, to
contemporary resistance to the imposition of nuclear plants and destruction of
coastlines based on corrupt interpretations of the public interest.
A powerful lesson from the vitality of Japanese commons is the value of shared
culture, identities, trust and shared perception and knowledge of the commons.
Sustainable governance, careful appropriation practices and sufficient provision
efforts are based on social capital. It has been shown that Japan –together with
the Scandinavian countries- is one of the countries with the lowest effective
level of economic inequity in the World (Wilinson, 2009). For people like myself,
coming from the global South the viability, richness and potential of commons
in Japan today have very empowering messages: that commons are not
obsolete remnant from the past, or the only options left to the poor, but an
important ingredient of true development quality of life and sound
environmental governance. This is indeed a rich opportunity for the IASC.
A month after Lin Ostrom received the Nobel Prize, I visited and interviewed her
with a crew from TV-UNAM, the video is still available in the IASC web page,
and in the Commons Digest. At the end of the interview I asked Lin if she
thought the IASC was still relevant after twenty years of existence. She strongly
stated it was because the IASC provided a unique “forum that disciplinary
meetings do not do, where scholars working in a variety of common-pool and
public goods, could meet and engage in serious cumulative discussion about
how diverse institutions help or hinder the solutions of common resources”. I
also asked her if she thought the IASC would be relevant in the next 30 years.
Positive and proactive as she was- her answer was: “Oh, for much longer than
this”.
The IASC we has followed a rich and long road initiated by great minds and
spirits, some of them no longer physically present any more. As my friend and
predecessor Ruth Meinzen-Dick stated in her presidential address at the XII
IASC Global Conference five years ago, our association has many achievements
to be proud of. IASC scholars have widely shown that tragedies of commons
managed by communities are far from being universal; that local citizens are
fundamental for production, protection and governance of local common
goods; including those resources that are nested into larger systems, even
global systems; that involved and informed communities are critical for cultural

3. and knowledge commons; that rights to use and control natural and/or cultural
goods matter even more than formal property regimes, and titling.
These theoretical lessons have been acknowledged in certain circles (even with
the Nobel Prize on Economics given to Elinor Ostrom), but the pace of their
acceptance and understanding is in general to slow and insufficient. A large, an
ongoing work remains to be done. Let me mention some of the frequent
challenges I find we face as scholars and as IASC:
• We know that knowledge and scientific evidence is required for better
governance, but governance is rooted in power relations, power
inequities that pervade our world. Scientists working on the commons
need to work close with civic society, while maintaining objectivity and
rigor, avoiding partisan positions that would erode the value and
credibility of scientific work and its potential policy impact. A hard
equilibrium that needs to be continuously redefined and rebalanced.
The frontier between policy and politics is not always clear1
. Some IASC
members as the practitioners getting the Elinor Ostrom Award: the
Foundation for Ecological Security from India, the Grupo de Estudios
Ambientales from Mexico and the Open Spaces Society from the UK
provide role models on how theory and practice on commons
governance can and should match and cross-fertilize, creating jointly
relevant and useful knowledge. We need to work with them, learn from
them, built shared visions.
• We also need to be innovative and build new instruments to
communicate and influence public opinion and policies affecting
commons and communities in many different settings, beyond our small
IASC community, reaching wider and diverse audiences; different
sectors, different regions of the world. How can we effectively coordinate
around this purpose, overcoming the important transaction costs implied
in the maintenance of a living academic and civic international
association? How can we create possibilities to learn, work and
communicate together?
• The “success and recognition of the “Commons/Collective Action” theory
is becoming a victim of its own success, miss understandings of the
commons and commons governance, ideological discourses based on
poorly defined concepts, commons and communities proposed as
universal panaceas; are new challenges that may undermine the
credibility of participatory governance systems, an even our own
academic work. How can we build bridges of understanding with those
1 Spanish (as well as other Latin languages) does not make the distinction between these two
terms that English does, and expresses policy and politics with the same word (política)

4. who recognize “the commons” basically in terms of a social/political
movement?
In the last decade the framework of the commons has increasingly dealt with
complexity, studying with different lens the varied relations among processes
taking place in diverse scales, involving diverse dynamics. The work of Fikret
Berkes, Oran Young, Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Marco Janssen, Lin Ostrom herself
and other IASC scholars in this direction has an enormous value added as it
provides new theoretical and research questions, inputs and frameworks to
face the dramatic contemporary challenges of the global commons, that more
frequent than not affect the local commons we traditionally work with. The
inter-connectedness of many processes taking place in distant scenarios is
increasingly evident, but challenging to understand and address in its full
complexity. Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom in their 2011 book, propose that
complex governance systems are required to address complex socio-ecological
changes and challenges. Thinking about the IASC, I would add that complex
socio-ecological challenges demand adaptive and complex knowledge
production practices and schemes, learning and communication institutions
and practices. Would we be able as IASC to build in this direction?
In order to do so, let me try to apply some of the learning acquired through the
study of others to our own practice and to our own commons: the IASC, our
shared production, our shared history, our social and human capital, our shared
potential. Do not worry I am not using the eight design principles, the three
attributes of the resources and the six attributes user groups that foster
institutional robustness (Ostrom, 1991, 1998) as a check list, applying each of
them to the analysis of the IASC. I only try to reflect on some of our current
dilemmas and potential trough some of -what I see- as key lessons from
collective action research, theory and practice.
From Foucault to Hess and Ostrom knowledge is regarded as a collective
venture. Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom specify that knowledge on the commons
is necessarily an outcome of collective efforts. Collective action, networks of
shared understanding and inter-exchange, based on norms, rules, trust and
reciprocity are fundamental for academic initiatives on the commons. But as
we fully know collective action is not a given, and incentives for collective
action are scare in academia. Trust and reciprocity fundamental to overcome
social dilemmas develop trough “working together”. Collective action within
the IASC is costly, hard to build and maintain, we need to develop ways to
incentivise it, treating it as one of our main assets.
Knowledge on the Commons, the good we produce, communicate and store, is
in itself a public good; as a public good it faces provision problems, people can
access most of our “knowledge products” without bearing the costs involved in
its production and maintenance. The social value of knowledge comes at a

5. large extent of its nature of public good: it is a good that enriches from being
accessed and used, whose value increases when it is shared and applied, but
erodes when it is not used or is miss used. Provision to enable knowledge
production and exchange on one side, and promotion of the use of knowledge
are challenges related with the social relevance of the knowledge in question.
They are also inter-related challenges. The “access and use” of our “knowledge
goods” by different actors should be a priority for the IASC, in order to do so,
we need to enlarge our partnerships and cooperative efforts. Please join us in
our different initiatives, propose new initiatives, use and own the IASC.
The third principle for the design of robust institutions in Ostrom´ s scheme,
the need of the “rules of the game” to be based on collective choice, is a
critical one as it relates to democracy, trust and legitimacy. I wonder if time has
come to create a “members task force” involved in the revision of our
governance system and our working strategy, taking into account the values of
adaptive knowledge and poly-centricity. This task clearly goes far beyond the
capacities of a person or a group, it requires the involvement of the wider
community.
The IASC is an increasingly complex community, heterogeneous in terms of
interests, ages, languages and backgrounds, a “community of communities”.
The initiatives and governance of the IASC today require nestedness (perhaps
the least frequent and least understood of “Ostrom design principles”). While
maintaining our “global commons” we need to foster particular regional and
“thematic” communities of interest. This has already happened as a result of
initiatives coming from the membership: During the last years aside of the
Global meetings, the IASC has held nine regional meetings: in Europe, Africa,
North America and Asia. Hopefully one will take place soon in Latin American.
In 2012 the community working on “New Commons”, organized the first and
important IASC thematic meeting on Knowledge Commons, this group is
planning a second similar thematic meeting. We need to work more in this
direction, developing new schemes and institutional design.
In 2010 Lin wrote a note for the annual IASC membership drive, her reflection
was then: the IASC is now itself a “global commons” committed to the
production and dissemination of knowledge, which is a “public good,” As
members we face a social dilemma in keeping IASC. In summary I would add
to Lin´ s reflection that the social dilemmas we confront, our challenges are not
only related to funding, but centrally with relevance, decentralization and
governance. They are inter-related dilemmas that can only be overcome by
continuously collective effort. This is for me a way to honor Lin´ s memory as
well as the founders of IASC whose work and perseverant commitment have
sustained our association along this road of two decades.

6. Lin Ostom´s legacy is rich and wide in academic but also in human terms. She
was a strong believer and a practitioner of egalitarian relationships, of trust and
reciprocity, of respectful listening. She repeatedly alerted against the dangers
of authoritarian practices and panaceas. But she was also very capable to
make dreams -collective utopias versus imposed panaceas- come true through
collective action. The Workshop of Political Theory and Policy Analysis (now
renamed Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop) is an example of the reach of
carefully sustained collective action, wise and generous leadership. The IASC is
also an achievement of the group who created the association more than
twenty years ago, a result of their innovative vision and sustained
commitment.
I hope for a common future that gives the IASC the chance to keep on building
knowledge on the commons, for the commons and commoners, to find ways to
understand and foster human capacity for trust and reciprocity, fundamental to
address many of the challenges our planet and our societies face today. May
the richness of Japan´ s common culture and the beauty of the sacred Fuji -san
inspire us to work and have fun together, base on the goal to contribute to a
better world.